Chilling

The road down the hill from my street to the zoo was anything but easy. The cars go as the snow falls; the weather changes but the people keep moving, keep living. Bunched brown snow collected in the center of the road with tread-marks painting a safer guideline. My brakes jerked and ground against the pads at the new stop light. I swerved right and decided to just go for it, sliding into the double football field length of the Pittsburgh Zoo's driveway. The weather was grimly gray and hazy, and the sun seemed trapped behind clouds forever.

I made my way to the tunnel before the fork. Icicles hung like glass beads from cracks of the ceiling. They horded what little light exists in Pittsburgh inside their tiny crystal bodies. The brightness jumped all over its body with each step I took.

The plants along the edge of the walkways from my last visits were now missing. I imagined they retreated and sought refuge beneath the dirt. Or someone yanked them out from the roots."Are they weeds?" a sign read. The information read that they want the plant-life to be natural. So if I trust the zookeepers, maybe the plants were consumed. Maybe the zoo could have a scavenging animal eat them up. I couldn't imagine an animal outside of the cages, for some reason.

I continued on. A couple of the garden's leafless stalks poked straight from the white puffs, reaching for some air. The air is thick when it's cold. Because of my asthma, I always feel like I'm smothering when the air gets anywhere below 30°.

At the visitor's office again, I am forbidden from seeing this gator. I told the lie that I'm a doctoral candidate of biology at the University of Pittsburgh. For some reason a title like that seemed more demanding, yet I still needed some sort of permission slip or divine right.

     When I did see Otis Alligator last October the air was still warm. He was drying up, in his boredom, or he was getting warm, in his relaxation. Always at the center of his rock slab.

     I balanced on his roped bridge, swaying, listening to the boards creaking. The grass was soft and green with only a couple of brown flecks. People were passing by, chattering or screaming about the alligator. A couple of kids threw pennies and quarters at him just to see if they could get a rise out of Otis.

     Usually I wish kids would just shut the fuck up, in the nicest way possible. Very rarely, but sometimes, I wish them harm. The inherently evil ones. Those money-throwing brats believed they weren't being watched, and maybe they weren't. So what if I tipped them over the bridge? Those children believed they should throw change at an animal so he will "perform" for them.

     What if I make them perform for me?

      I would never actually do that. People are watching, and I guess I kind of love children right in the middle of hating them.


A friend recently labeled me as "the nicest misanthrope." For a reason, I guess.


Three months later, I'm sitting on the same bridge where the bullying happened. Nobody's here now, and in this particular spot, nobody's ever here. I'm no longer nervous passing over the barrier. I merely think of it as a strange bump in the regular pathway.

Of those I saw walking toward the exit, I heard them say "This was a bad idea," and "I can't believe they make you pay for this in the winter." At the bridge and at the petting zoo, there are no people. No mean-spirited children. No kind children. Not even Otis. Just me, a couple of goats, the sea lion and the polar bear.

The goats have a cashmere undercoat which grows longer in the winter, so they're just as bundled up as I am. Aquatic animals generally don't have a difficult time in the winter.

The polar bear's dancing again. She literally paces forward and paces backward, shaking her head and bottom to and fro like a samba or shuffle. It's not a meditative, focused pace. It's very clearly a fun thing for her. She is having a frosty good time. I legitimately feel good about this. She's always miserable hiding in the cool corner of her cave in the summer months.

I wish I could be "the coldest scholar on earth" and think of snow as "a book to be read" (Haines) or throw a personal nippy party like the polar bear. I wish I could dance and growl and think these white mites falling from the sky aren't a constant reminder of where I'm from, where I am. I wish I could say I've gotten used to this after twenty six years.